A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are often developed using formal design and modeling techniques.
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. It is a declarative programming paradigm, which means programming is done with expressions or declarations instead of statements. Functional code is idempotent, the output value of a function depends only on the arguments that are passed to the function, so calling a function f twice with the same value for an argument x produces the same result f(x) each time; this is in contrast to procedures depending on a local or global state, which may produce different results at different times when called with the same arguments but a different program state. Eliminating side effects, i.e., changes in state that do not depend on the function inputs, can make it much easier to understand and predict the behavior of a program, which is one of the key motivations for the development of functional programming.
A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. A spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document.
Computerized batch processing, since the 1964 introduction of the IBM System/360, has primarily referred to the scripted running of one or more programs, as directed by Job Control Language, with no human interaction other than, if JCL-requested, the mounting of one or more pre-determined input and/or output computer tapes.
In computing, an optimizing compiler is a compiler that tries to minimize or maximize some attributes of an executable computer program. The most common requirement is to minimize the time taken to execute a program; a less common one is to minimize the amount of memory occupied. The growth of portable computers has created a market for minimizing the power consumed by a program.
Multiversion concurrency control, is a concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory.
In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations:
In computer science, consistency models are used in distributed systems like distributed shared memory systems or distributed data stores. The system is said to support a given model if operations on memory follow specific rules. The data consistency model specifies a contract between programmer and system, wherein the system guarantees that if the programmer follows the rules, memory will be consistent and the results of reading, writing, or updating memory will be predictable. This is different from coherence, which occurs in systems that are cached or cache-less, and is consistency of data with respect to all processors. Coherence deals with maintaining a global order in which writes to a single location or single variable are seen by all processors. Consistency deals with the ordering of operations to multiple locations with respect to all processors.
In computer science, read-copy-update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism based on mutual exclusion. It is used when performance of reads is crucial and is an example of space–time tradeoff, enabling fast operations at the cost of more space.
A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format". Oracle defines it as a collection of tables with metadata. The term can have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to databases and database management systems (DBMS):
Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.
A memory barrier, also known as a membar, memory fence or fence instruction, is a type of barrier instruction that causes a central processing unit (CPU) or compiler to enforce an ordering constraint on memory operations issued before and after the barrier instruction. This typically means that operations issued prior to the barrier are guaranteed to be performed before operations issued after the barrier.
A control element in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct manipulation to read or edit information about an application. User interface libraries such as Windows Presentation Foundation, GTK+, and Cocoa, contain a collection of controls and the logic to render these.
In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It is an alternative to lock-based synchronization. STM is a strategy implemented in software, rather than as a hardware component. A transaction in this context occurs when a piece of code executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper by Tom Knight. The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. In 1995 Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM). Since 2005, STM has been the focus of intense research and support for practical implementations is growing.
In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to just "the stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software, the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages. Many computer instruction sets provide special instructions for manipulating stacks.
Replication in computing involves sharing information so as to ensure consistency between redundant resources, such as software or hardware components, to improve reliability, fault-tolerance, or accessibility.
In the fields of information technology and systems management, application performance management (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. APM is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning ."
In computing, reactive programming is a declarative programming paradigm concerned with data streams and the propagation of change. With this paradigm it is possible to express static or dynamic data streams with ease, and also communicate that an inferred dependency within the associated execution model exists, which facilitates the automatic propagation of the changed data flow.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to databases:
